Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera (84 page)

Simon lived in Jersey City, in an old part once known as Communipaw. Once a moderately historical area, it was now a prison town. Most of the people who resided there worked for the prison, or worked in a job that supported the prison and its employees. The driver pulled up to a three-story house on Communipaw Avenue, nestled between a redbrick industrial building and a smaller garage-type shack. None of the three buildings looked occupied, and ours was the only car on the street.

The old house had iron bars over every one of the windows and the front door—to keep intruders out, or to keep Simon in?

“The middle floor is mine,” Simon said as he led us up a steep, narrow flight of stairs.

Aaron followed behind him, while I brought up the rear, my bag slung over one shoulder. The stairs were clean, the walls freshly painted, and the faint sounds of music drifted from somewhere in the building. At the first landing, Simon used a key to open the only door, which led us into a short hallway with two more doors. The door on the left was open, and the music was coming out of it. The right door was locked, and Simon reached past Aaron to hand me a key.

“That’s the empty apartment you two can use,” Simon said, pointing at the closed door. “I put two air mattresses and some blankets in there. I’m sorry it’s not furnished beyond the bare essentials.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s not like we expected anyone to cough up a five-star hotel stay while we’re here.”

“Daddy?” A familiar child’s voice shouted the question. Then the music went silent, and small feet pounded across the floor toward us.

Simon’s face lit up in a broad, genuine smile, and he turned to catch Caleb as the gangly boy launched himself at Simon like they’d been apart for weeks. Caleb clung to his father like a spider monkey, all thin arms and legs, and laughed like they’d just shared a funny joke.

“I’m only home for a few minutes,” Simon said. “Remember I said we’re having guests for a couple of days?”

“Uh-huh.” Caleb nodded solemnly as he eyeballed me and Aaron. He had Simon’s nose, but everything else about the boy was from his mother—whose name we’d never confirmed, but had narrowed down based on the fact that Caleb was half Chinese, and so was only one female ex-Bane. He’d been through all kinds of hell from the day he was born (under God knows what conditions) and spent the next five years living in squalor, his existence undetected by the prison guards, only to have a psychotic murderer invade his brain for a few minutes last January.

It was amazing he could still seem so . . . adjusted.

Oh yeah, he also once stopped a bullet with a thought, which pretty much made him the strongest telekinetic person alive. Not bad for a midget.

“Do you remember Ethan?” Simon asked. “From California?”

Caleb blinked at me a few times, then smiled and said, “Wind Bag.”

Aaron snorted laughter.

Thank you, Renee
. “Close enough,” I said.

“This is Scott,” Simon said, nodding at Aaron. We’d agreed to keep up the charade in front of Caleb, because you really never knew when a kid might blurt out a secret.

Caleb’s face twisted into an epic frown as he considered Aaron-as-Scott, who shifted from foot to foot, squirming under the scrutiny of the pint-size Meta. Interesting. Aaron didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. There was apparently no fooling Caleb, because he leaned forward a little and stage-whispered, “Are you in disguise?”

Aaron’s eyebrows shot into his hairline.

“I won’t tell,” Caleb said. He made an X over his heart with one hand.

“Um, thank you?” Aaron said. He’d dropped the accent, but the glamour didn’t so much as flicker.

“Luisa is making grilled cheese for lunch,” Caleb announced to his dad. “Can you stay?”

Simon glanced inside the apartment door—at a nearby clock, I assumed—then shifted Caleb to his other hip. “I think we can stay for lunch.” To us he said, “If you don’t mind?”

“No, it’s fine,” I said.

“Great. You can drop your bags off next door, and then come on over.”

“Okay.”

Simon carried Caleb into the apartment. He left the door open, and a female voice shouted out a greeting. Probably the aforementioned Luisa, who I guessed to be Caleb’s babysitter. I don’t know why that connection surprised me so much. It’s not like I assumed Caleb was left alone all day to fend for himself. Obviously he had a caregiver while Simon was working.

I unlocked the other apartment door and was slapped in the face by the unmistakable smell of stale air recently sprayed with cheap deodorizer. Simon wasn’t kidding when he said he didn’t use this place. The large front room was empty of everything except two inflated air mattresses, each piled with linens, and two ancient beach chairs. The kitchen had no cabinet doors or appliances, and I was a little scared to check out the bathroom. Everything was clean, though, and I didn’t see any obvious signs of bugs or other creepy-crawlies in residence.

Aaron dropped his bag next to one of the mattresses and started laughing.

I let him go for a few seconds, then asked, “You gonna let me in on the joke?”

“Sorry.” He sobered up, his amusement shifting to something sadder. The glamour flickered, and for an instant, I caught a glimpse of the real Aaron underneath of Scott. “I was just thinking that Simon should have pitched a tent in here, since we’re practically camping as it is.”

“Well, if you want a tent, I’m sure we can scare one up.”

“No doubt.”

“You’d have to pitch it, though. I’ve never been camping in my life.” Now, why had I just said that? We weren’t friends, and we sure as hell weren’t going to start bonding.

“Really?” Scott’s face melted away and left Aaron looking at me with open surprise. “Our parents took us camping all the time when we were kids. Me, Noah, and Jimmy.” His expression froze, and grief picked at the edges. Jimmy Scott, the youngest of the three brothers, had been killed two months ago, and his death was still an open wound for the family. Killed by Ace and King’s own psycho sister, as a matter of fact.

I guess grief and murderous family members are two things Aaron and I actually have in common.

I also felt like I needed to say something to fill the awkward silence. “Sounds like you’ve got some good memories of when you all were kids.”

“Yeah, I do. Aaron has a lot of good memories.” He didn’t slip into speaking about himself in the third person very often, but I understood why he did it this time. With so many other consciousnesses buried inside his mind, he surely had other childhood memories to compare Aaron’s with. Not even counting the life King the Changeling had led within the stark walls of Weatherfield—Aaron’s life had probably been a picnic compared to growing up as a science project.

Aaron’s life had also gone off the rails at some point, because up until permanently joining forces with King, Aaron had been (according to Dahlia and Aaron himself) a selfish prick who abandoned his younger brothers in search of the next party and the next big fix. No one hits rock bottom for the fun of it, but the skeletons rattling around in his closet weren’t any of my business.

Knowing that didn’t stop me from asking, “So what changed?”

He opened his mouth, then shut it just as fast. The glamour of Scott Torres crept up until Aaron was hidden again. “I did.” He punctuated the statement with his exit from the apartment.

Five

Manhattan Island Penitentiary

O
ur first stop after lunch was Ellis Island. A military fort, an immigration station, and then a museum, Ellis Island now housed the prison’s main observation tower. It had been built on the site of the old Main Building just after the War, and five stories of concrete and steel served as the activity hub for everything that happened in Manhattan and at the dozens of other checkpoints around the island’s secured perimeter.

The distance from the Jersey shore to the island was relatively small, but only official copters were allowed to land on Ellis. Simon signed us in with a pair of snarly guards armed with high-powered rifles who barely gave me or Aaron-as-Scott a second glance when they handed us visitor badges, then he led us over to the warming copter.

“Wouldn’t it be faster if you flew us over?” Aaron whispered, barely audible above the whir of the copter blades.

“Maybe,” I said, “but something tells me Lieutenant Itchy Trigger Finger would love an excuse to shoot us down.”

“Good point.”

We climbed into the copter like good little prison visitors and let it fly us over the bay to Ellis Island. A puddle-jump in a copter was a lot less stress-inducing than our four-hour flight in a jet, and then we were walking briskly down a stone path toward the observation tower’s entrance. Simon flashed his own badge in front of a white panel. Something buzzed, and he pulled the glass door open and indicated that we should go inside.

The tower lobby was empty of everything except two elevators and a door marked Emergency Stairs—no furniture, no man at a desk to tell us where to go. Everything seemed automated and impersonal, with no signs that a significant historical building had once stood here before a big old Meta battle leveled the entire thing. Just one more landmark on a long list of them destroyed during the Meta War.

Simon flashed his badge in front of another silver panel between the elevators. The doors on the right slid open with a chime. The interior of the elevator was as boring as the lobby, all buffed chrome. Aaron fidgeted the entire ride up, apparently more nervous than I had thought, and with good reason. The federal government was not, to our knowledge, aware of the existence of Recombinants, and by bringing one into the prison, we were trying to get a big one over on a lot of powerful people.

Not that I cared about our minor subterfuge; I just didn’t want it to backfire on us.

The elevator stopped on the top floor, and we walked out into a circular room the size of the entire tower. Directly ahead of us was a wall of computer monitors, occasionally spaced by a window that gave us a nice view of New Jersey. Clusters of desks stood around other monitors, and the constant hum of machinery and voices gave the room a lively atmosphere that was cut by the somber nature of the workers’ navy federal corrections uniforms.

A handful of those workers paused in their tasks long enough to give us a variety of looks—some hateful, some curious—but Simon didn’t seem to notice. He led us to the other side of the elevator banks, where a long swath of windows presented a perfect view of the Manhattan shoreline—and the one-hundred-foot-tall electrified fence running along its entire perimeter. Ruined skyscrapers still dotted the skyline, only a few still standing taller than twenty stories, evidence of the battles waged here two decades ago. Almost eighty ex-Banes and their kids lived over there, scraping out a crappy existence in the bones of a once-glamorous and industrious city.

And somewhere on that island was my mother’s murderer, my father.

My insides twisted up at the thought. He was so close now. It wouldn’t take much effort to just fly over the wall and search for the bastard, to finally look him in the eyes and . . . well, something.

“Tempest?” Simon’s voice startled me back into my present situation. I’d stopped midstep to stare at the prison and was getting curious looks from him and Aaron.

“Sorry,” I said, and angled my head at the windows. “It’s been awhile.”

“I understand. Come on.” He took us to a workstation near the windows, separated from the other desks and workers by a very conspicuous distance.

“They afraid they’re going to catch Meta?” I asked.

Simon shrugged. “I may have credentials, but they still look at me as a prisoner and a criminal. No matter what good I do in the future, I’ll still die an ex-Bane and a villain.”

“Do you truly believe that?” Aaron asked in his affected accent.

“Your tablets have the same information that I do,” Simon replied, ignoring the question, “and as you know, it’s incomplete. Have you read the files on the prisoners that we haven’t managed to locate?”

“Yes,” I replied, while Aaron nodded. “Do you have an idea of where to start searching?”

“I do.” He turned on his computer and brought up a satellite map of the island. Touched a section near the southernmost section of Central Park, which expanded it to full screen. “Believe it or not, the majority of us lived near Columbus Circle and still do. Central Park holds a lot of awful memories for you kids, but it’s also the closest we could get to freedom, especially for our own children. And it was one of the only parts of the city that still has a fresh water supply.” He pointed at a building near Central Park South, along Fifty-Ninth Street. “Right here is where they’ve settled. It was an apartment building once upon a time. We call it the Warren.”

“The Warren?” Aaron asked.

“Like a rabbit warren.”

“Who came up with that?”

Simon opened and closed his mouth once, then frowned. “I honestly could not tell you now.”

“Okay, good, the Warren,” I said, “but what about the people we’re looking for?”

“Rumor is they still show up occasionally to barter for supplies and food,” Simon replied, “so they must be within the general area. But they probably stay nomadic in order to remain undetected.”

“That still gives us hundreds of city blocks to get lost in.”

“This is where your ability to fly comes in handy.”

“Naturally.”
I get to be the airborne human target.

Simon changed the satellite image to a digital map. Dozens of red dots appeared over sections of the city, everywhere from the Upper West Side to Turtle Bay and Midtown. “These are known sightings of missing prisoners. I can’t guarantee they never travel farther north than Central Park, but the Harlem fire destroyed almost everything above 115th Street, so there isn’t much there.”

Good point.

“And not long after the War ended, the authorities cut off water to everything north of Sixty-First and south of Fifty-Sixth.”

That much had been in our tablet research, and it made sense that our targets would hang around a source of clean water.

“And we’ll have some tracking assistance from one of the Warren residents.”

“Really?” I’d have been less surprised if he told me we were getting help from the president himself. “Who?”

“Her name is Mai Lynn Chang. She’s a cat shifter, so her nose will come in very handy.”

“Like Mar—Onyx?” Aaron asked. He caught himself before using the wrong name—code names in public were still standard operating procedure—and before I could say the same thing. Onyx was also a shifter, but he was limited to three shapes: panther, raven, and black house cat.

“Similar,” Simon replied. “Mai Lynn can take the shape of any feline she’s seen with her own eyes. After she discovered her ability as a teen, she spent a lot of time traveling and visiting zoos. She has quite a number of large cats in her repertoire.”

Two things about the way Simon spoke of Mai Lynn did not go over my head. First, her last name was Chang, traditionally a Chinese name. Second, his voice changed when he talked about her. Softer, more familiar, like they were friends—maybe more. Simon’s exes weren’t any of my business (or of any interest to me beyond their impact on our job here), but I was crazy curious about this one.

“Why did Mai Lynn volunteer to help us?” I asked. “What’s she get in return?”

Simon frowned. “Why do you believe I had to trade something for her assistance?”

Because she’s a Bane.
Self-preservation kept that one in my head, and I did not look Simon in the eye. He was smart enough to know I was thinking it without using his powers on me. “So why else? Is she that bored over on Columbus Circle?”

“Hardly. The people living there are content to stay. They’ve survived here on next to nothing for the last fifteen years, but when our powers returned, they were able to build something that can last. Even though Teresa is working toward pardons, most of them want to remain here. They’ve created a community, and they want Manhattan. They’d just prefer to have it without the fence and guards and tracking collars. But the government won’t even consider it until everyone is accounted for and interviewed, which is why we’re going out there. Mai Lynn’s assistance is a show of goodwill from the Warren residents. They want to help make this happen.”

I waited for him to add something along the lines of “Oh, and she’s Caleb’s mother,” but he didn’t. Simon looked between me and Aaron, probably waiting for one of us to comment on his responses to my questions. I just wasn’t ready to let him off the hook. “No one else living in the Warren has powers that would be more useful to us?” I knew for a fact that there were, because I’d read the bios.

Simon didn’t take the bait. “Of course there are, Tempest, but this was a voluntary assignment. Mai Lynn volunteered.”

“And she gets nothing except the satisfaction of helping her community.”

“Anything Mai Lynn gets beyond what I’ve said are between her and Warden Hudson.”

Ding! Ladies and gentlemen, we have an under-the-table deal in our midst
.

Mai Lynn was definitely getting something extra for helping us, and it was too personal for Simon to just come out and say it. My best guess? Caleb. Eight months ago, Simon had agreed to help us in exchange for being able to take Caleb out of Manhattan and bring him to Los Angeles. I already knew he’d do anything to protect his son.

I guessed we were going to find out if Momma Cat felt the same way about her kitten.

“Fair enough,” I said. “So what’s the plan?”

“A copter will take us over and drop us off in the Park, around West Sixtieth,” Simon replied. “Today we’ll go over to the Warren. You’ll meet Mai Lynn and a few other people. Take a look around and get your bearings in the city. Tomorrow we’ll start the hunt.”

Tomorrow I start looking for you, Jinx, you murdering bastard.

•   •   •

The second copter ride left me unexpectedly dizzy, and it had nothing to do with the pilot’s flying skills. Being hundreds of feet in the air, hovering high above the familiar expanse of Central Park, is what made me want to bend over and tuck my head between my knees. Fortunately for my flying companions, lunch stayed down and I stayed conscious.

My last memories of Central Park were the stuff of nightmares: smoke and fire, cold and rain, the bitter taste of fear in my mouth, the scorched and withered landscape. Friends dying around me. Metal statues melting. Buildings falling to the ground. I remembered exhaustion, being cold all the way to my bones, and the searing agony of being shot by a madman.

And then the confusion of losing our powers. Even the Banes who’d stormed Belvedere Castle in an effort to slaughter us didn’t know what had happened or what to do next. We had no powers to fight with. The Banes eventually left us alone, scared away by the gun we took off a dead man and that then-fifteen-year-old Gage wielded like the leader he became that day. He didn’t realize until later that the gun didn’t have any more bullets in it.

Sixteen kids landed in Central Park via copter; five us were still alive.

Simon and Aaron climbed out first. I paused in the doorway, heart suddenly jackhammering in my chest, the whir of the copter blades stirring the warm summer air and the thick leaves of nearby trees. The Park looked like it had in pictures taken decades ago, when it was alive and thriving. Grass and trees and flowers had taken over earth I remembered being brown and dead. The sun shined down—no cold rain.

I stepped out of the copter and into a strange world that had thrived on the graves of lost lives. With a question in his eyes, “Scott” grabbed my elbow and tugged me away from the copter so it could take off again. The pilot left us alone near a low stone wall. Beyond the cracked pavement of Eighth Avenue were decrepit and crumbling buildings that had once cost a fortune to rent. On our side of the wall was that small slice of freedom Simon had spoken of.

“Are you all right?” Simon asked.

My ready supply of sarcasm abandoned me, and I replied honestly for a change. “I’m not sure. It’s a little overwhelming to be back here and see it so . . . nice.”

Simon gave me what I decided was a fatherly smile. “Nothing grew the first spring, but by the next year the grass started coming back. We found seeds in different stores, but it was several summers before the ground could grow anything other than weeds. Now there’s a large community garden about a block east of here. I’ll show you later.”

A garden.
A garden?!

“Don’t look so surprised,” Simon said. “We scavenged everything we could across the island to supplement that garbage the federal government dropped on us. Meat and dairy have always been an issue, but thanks to that garden, no one is starving any longer.” An acerbic
no thanks to them
dangled on the end of that sentence, punctuated by the look in his eyes. The look of a man with a serious grudge, who still held a small hope of getting even.

Simon had been imprisoned here with the other Banes. I’d always known that, but I had somehow never put it together with the reality of my own experience in Central Park. He’d been here during that final battle, when we were running for our lives. Maybe he wasn’t part of the group that had attacked Belvedere Castle, and I don’t remember seeing him that day, but he was here. He fought our parents and mentors in those last, brutal battles. And he spent the next fifteen years paying for those crimes. He never spoke about the War or the years following, and I never asked.